AURA by Secure Start
Keeping therapeutic relationships in mind during everyday care and education.
AURA by Secure Start and Classroom AURA are simple reflective apps designed to help caregivers and educators keep the quality of their everyday interactions with children in mind.
Both apps are based on AURA, the therapeutic-responding framework within the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
AURA asks adults to reflect on four qualities of their interactions with children:
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
The apps provide brief prompts to help bring these qualities into the ordinary moments in which relationships, care, learning and development occur.
What is AURA?
AURA helps translate understanding into therapeutic responding.
Within the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care, AAA helps us ask:
What might be happening for this child?
AURA then asks:
What can I do to respond therapeutically?
Its four dimensions are:
Accessible
Am I emotionally and physically available when needed?
Children benefit from experiencing important adults as available and approachable.
Accessibility does not mean constantly pursuing children or demanding closeness. It means communicating, through our behaviour and presence, that support is available when it is needed.
Understanding
Have I tried to understand what might be underneath the behaviour?
Understanding involves curiosity about the child’s experience.
Rather than responding only to the behaviour we can see, we consider what the child may be feeling, expecting, communicating or needing.
Understanding does not mean accepting unsafe behaviour or abandoning appropriate boundaries.
Responsive
Did my response meet the child’s need in that moment?
Children need different things at different times.
Sometimes they need comfort. Sometimes encouragement, practical assistance, space, structure, co-regulation, protection or a clear boundary.
Responsiveness means considering what this particular child needs in this particular moment.
Attuned
Was I connected, warm and emotionally in sync?
Attunement concerns the emotional quality of our interaction.
Children experience our tone, expression, timing, warmth and emotional presence as well as the things we say and do.
Attunement also includes recognising when connection has been disrupted and being willing to repair the relationship.
Small moments matter
AURA is built around a simple idea:
The ordinary moments of children’s lives matter.
Getting ready in the morning.
Going to school.
Receiving help.
Being corrected.
Managing disappointment.
Sharing enjoyment.
Becoming upset.
Hearing “no”.
Reconnecting after something has gone wrong.
These interactions happen repeatedly.
For children affected by adversity, they can provide opportunities to experience adults as available, interested, responsive and emotionally connected.
No single interaction changes a child’s developmental history.
But small moments, repeated consistently, can become developmentally significant experiences.
AURA by Secure Start
AURA by Secure Start is designed for parents, foster carers, kinship carers, residential caregivers and other adults providing ongoing care to children and young people.
The app provides brief daily prompts based upon the four AURA dimensions:
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
It encourages caregivers to reflect upon the experience they are creating for the child without requiring lengthy recording or assessment.
AURA is designed to support reflection rather than evaluate caregiver performance.
It can be used independently as a simple reflective companion. Within organisations implementing Triple-A, it can also help keep AURA visible between training, supervision and everyday practice.
Classroom AURA
Classroom AURA applies the same four relational dimensions to educational settings.
It is designed to help teachers and educators reflect on whether their interactions with students are:
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
Classroom AURA recognises that relationships and learning are interconnected.
Students experience not only what educators teach, but how adults respond when they struggle, make mistakes, become distressed, need help or experience success.
The app provides brief prompts during the school day to help educators keep these relational experiences in mind.
Classroom AURA does not turn teachers into therapists.
It provides a simple framework for reflective, relational practice within the ordinary work of education.
Reflection, not assessment
The AURA apps are not psychological assessments.
They do not assess attachment, trauma, parenting capacity, teacher effectiveness or children’s psychological functioning.
They do not provide clinical recommendations or determine whether someone is providing “good” or “bad” care.
The prompts are designed to support reflection.
Some days will be difficult.
There will be interactions we would handle differently with hindsight.
AURA is not about achieving perfection.
It is about repeatedly bringing our attention back to the quality of the experience we are creating around the child.
AURA and Triple-A
AURA forms one half of the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
AAA — Understanding
Attachment
Arousal
Accessibility to needs provision
asks:
What might be happening for this child?
AURA — Therapeutic Responding
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
asks:
What can I do to respond therapeutically?
The AURA apps provide a practical way of keeping the second of these questions present during everyday life.
Using an AURA app does not mean that an individual or organisation has been trained, certified or licensed in the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
The apps are reflective tools based upon one of the Model’s core frameworks.
A simple daily reflection
AURA is intentionally brief.
The objective is not to add another substantial task to an already busy day.
Instead, the prompts invite a few moments of reflection:
Was I available?
Did I try to understand?
Was I responsive to the child’s need?
Was I warm, connected and attuned?
Over time, these questions can help keep relational and therapeutic caregiving in mind.
Privacy and your reflections
AURA is intended to be a private reflective tool.
[I would retain the existing accurate privacy/data wording from your current app page here rather than rewrite the technical claims unless we check them against the current iOS and Android builds.]
That section should accurately explain where information is stored, whether accounts are required, what information Secure Start can access, and what happens if the app is deleted.
Learn more
Learn about AURA — Therapeutic Responding
Learn about AAA — Understanding the Child
Learn about the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care
Training for Schools
Triple-A Training and Implementation
Download the apps
AURA by Secure Start
For parents, foster carers, kinship carers, residential caregivers and other adults providing care to children and young people.
Classroom AURA
For teachers and educators seeking a simple way to keep relational practice in mind during the school day.